Cryptography protects data from unwanted access. Cryptography typically involves mathematical operations on data (encryption) that makes the original data (plaintext) unintelligible (ciphertext). Reverse mathematical operations (decryption) restore the original data from the ciphertext. Cryptography covers a wide variety of applications beyond encrypting and decrypting data. For example, cryptography is often used in authentication (i.e., reliably determining the identity of a communicating agent), the generation of digital signatures, and so forth.
Current cryptographic techniques rely heavily on intensive mathematical operations. For example, many schemes use a type of modular arithmetic known as modular exponentiation which involves raising a large number to some power and reducing it with respect to a modulus (i.e., the remainder when divided by given modulus). Mathematically, modular exponentiation can be expressed as ge mod M where e is the exponent and M the modulus.
Conceptually, multiplication and modular reduction are straight-forward operations. However, often the sizes of the numbers used in these systems are very large and significantly surpass the native wordsize of a processor. For example, a cryptography protocol may require modular operations on numbers 1024 to 4096 bits in length or greater while many processors have native wordsizes of only 32 or 64 bits. Performing operations on such large numbers may be very expensive in terms of time and in terms of computational resources.